Neil Klugman Timeline and Summary

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• Neil calls Brenda on the phone after meeting her earlier at the Green Lane Country Club.
• That evening he watches her play a tennis game. Then they talk and have their first kiss.
• He spends the following day with Brenda.
• In the evening, he goes to her house and eats dinner with the family.
• After dinner, he lets Julie win at basketball, almost against his will.
• The next day he meets a boy at the library and protects him from being thrown out by racist library employees.
• That night he is tricked into babysitting for Julie while the rest of the family takes Ron to the airport.
• He tries to beat Julie at ping-pong.
• When Brenda gets back home, they make love for the first time.
• The boy returns to the library and seems interested only in a book of Paul Gauguin's paintings of Tahiti.
• Neil lies to keep another patron from checking out the book.
• When he leaves the library to spend his vacation with Brenda, he worries about what will become of the book and the boy.
• When Harriet arrives days before the wedding, Neil decides to ask Brenda to buy a diaphragm.
• She really doesn't want to, and they fight about it.
• Eventually, though, he pressures her to lie to a doctor and get a diaphragm.
• After attending Ron and Harriet's wedding, Brenda goes back to school, and Neil goes back to work.
• The day before Rosh Hashana, the Jewish New Year, Neil takes the train to Boston to meet Brenda.
• He learns that she left the diaphragm at home, and her mother found it. Now her parents are mad and don't want her to see Neil.
• He accuses her of leaving it on purpose to sabotage the relationship.
• They fight and then Neil leaves.
• He looks at his reflection in the window of the Harvard library and tries to see inside himself.
• He feels better after he sees the books beyond his reflection.
• He takes the train back to Newark and gets there in time to go to work.